Would Colin Noble pass GCSE English?

Suffolk County Council Cabinet Member
Cllr Colin Noble

Some people just cannot stop themselves. As this blog has detailed Colin Noble made some unwise comments about Mildenhall Community College’s GCSE results at a parish council meeting. This made the papers and he then wrote a blog about it.

That really should have been the end of the matter but Colin Noble seems to have failed to heed the wise saying when in a hole, stop digging!

He has written yet another blog post about it specifically concentrating on the Maths and English results which he says the school has not published.

As is well know there were significant issues with this year's GCSE English results. In fairness to Suffolk County Council both Simon White the Director for Education and Graham Newman the Portfolio Holder have supported Suffolk schools on this issue even helping to pay for re-marking.

But Colin Noble is not being so generous claiming he knows the results and challenging the school to publish what he calls the “litmus test” i.e. the Maths and English GCSE results.

What makes me particularly angry with Colin Noble’s post is that it is extremely badly written. I don’t mean it has the odd typo or spelling mistake. I mean so badly written that if it was submitted for GCSE English it would fail to get a C grade.

This is not my opinion. I sent this to an English teacher who lives well away from Suffolk to “mark” and this was the opinion of the teacher:

Overall, the piece lacks clarity and coherence, and is littered with basic errors of grammar and punctuation…..All of these areas would need to be improved before the piece would reach a Grade C. At best, it would get a D.

You can see below the comments the teacher made marking just three paragraphs of the post.
School Report on Colin Noble

If you are going to criticise a school for not getting good enough English exam results I think that you should take particular care to look at the standard of your own writing.

If we are to raise the bar in Suffolk then maybe we need to start at the top with our Cabinet members!